I will argue that a key feature of working time within high-tech industries is unpredictability, which alters the way time is experienced and perceived. It affects all aspects of time, from working hours to work organisation, to career, to the distinction between work and life. Although many desire variety in work and the ability to control working hours, unpredictability causes dissatisfaction.

It gives pinpoint real-time performance metric visibility to engineers working on specific hosts — basically sending back system-level performance data to their browser, where a client-side renderer turns it into a usable dashboard. Essentially the idea is to replace having to ssh onto instances, run “top”, systat, iostat, and so on.